James' World 2

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CLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration is dismantling a 35-year-old effort to track global climate change that was used to shape regulations and policies across the government.

Federal employees at the U.S. Global Change Research Program were removed from their positions Tuesday, and a government contract with ICF International, which has supported the National Climate Assessment for years, was severed, according to two former officials who were granted anonymity to avoid reprisals.

The move marks a key step by the administration to undermine federal climate research as it rolls back environmental regulations and promotes additional fossil fuel production.

The program was established by Congress in 1990 and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. In addition to climate science, it focused on land productivity, water resources, fisheries, ecosystems, and the atmosphere. Its most visible product was the National Climate Assessment, a Congress-mandated report that comes out every four years and is used to help shape environmental rules, legislation, and infrastructure projects.

Decades ago, the program identified how a depleted ozone layer was harming Americans, leading to regulations to address the issue.

The next version of the National Climate Assessment is due late next year or in early 2027.

The changes mirror the writings of Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who wants to eliminate the program so its work can’t be used to bolster federal climate regulations in court battles.

Vought wrote a chapter in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has been closely followed by President Donald Trump, in which he outlined how to “reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs.”

The chapter spells out how the program could make it harder to enact pro-industry policy and fight court battles that challenge environmental regulations. The USGCRP would “be confined to a more limited advisory role,” he wrote.

“USGCRP actions can frustrate successful litigation defense in ways that the career bureaucracy should not be permitted to control,” the chapter said.

Under Vought’s proposal, OMB would help select researchers to produce a National Climate Assessment that relies on a small pool of scientists who question humanity’s contributions to climate change and give equal weight to industry-produced studies.

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Hypocrisy has been quite frequent in this election cycle! Here is a hypocrisy quote.

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Hypocrisy is the audacity to preach integrity from a den of corruption.  Wes Fesler

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Maybe it comes up in passing from a colleague, or maybe it hits harder in a 360 review. Either way, that kind of feedback can sting. It’s that gut-punch moment where you think, Wait . . . what? You’ve been putting in the work, prioritizing the team (at least in your mind), but somehow people aren’t seeing it. They don’t get the pressure you’re under, the decisions you’ve had to make, or why things played out the way they did.

Here’s the hard truth: Perception is reality. You might feel like you’re doing everything right, but if your team feels disconnected or frustrated, their experience is what matters most. It’s time to pause, reflect, and figure out how things veered off course.

No, it’s not fair. And no, you can’t fix it overnight. But you can make a plan to rebuild trust, reconnect with your team, and start turning things around—one step at a time.

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[Photo: Monster Ztudio/Adobe Stock]

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It is rare to read about “spectacular progress” or a “once-in-a-century” result in mathematics. That’s for good reason: if a problem has not had a solution for many years, then completely new approaches and ideas are usually needed to tackle it. This is also the case with the innocent-looking “Kakeya conjecture,” which relates to the question of how to rotate a needle in such a way that it takes up as little space as possible.

Experts have been racking their brains over the associated problems since 1917. But in a preprint paper posted in February, mathematician Hong Wang of New York University and her colleague Joshua Zahl of the University of British Columbia finally proved the three-dimensional version of the Kakeya conjecture. “It stands as one of the top mathematical achievements of the 21st century,” said mathematician Eyal Lubetzky of N.Y.U. in a recent press release.

Suppose there is an infinitely narrow needle on a table. Now you want to rotate it 360 degrees so that the tip of the needle points once in each direction of the plane. To do this, you can hold the needle in the middle and rotate it. As it rotates, the needle then covers the surface of a circle.

But if you are clever, the needle can make its 360-degree journey while taking less space. In 1917, mathematician Sōichi Kakeya wanted to investigate the smallest area required to rotate the needle. For example, by rotating not only the outer end of the needle but also its center, you can obtain an area that corresponds to a triangle with curved sides.Years later, mathematician Abram Besicovitch made an unexpected discovery. If you keep moving the needle back and forth like a complex parallel parking maneuver, the surface that the infinitely narrow needle covers can actually have a total area of zero.

The Dimension of an Area of Zero?

From there, experts began to wonder what dimension this “Kakeya surface” has. Usually surfaces in a plane, such as a rectangle or a circle, are two-dimensional. But there are exceptions: fractals, for example, can also have fractional dimensions, meaning they can be 1.5-dimensional, for instance.

Because the Kakeya surfaces can look very jagged, the question of dimensionality is an obvious one. In fact, it has implications for many other areas of mathematics, including harmonic analysis, which breaks down complicated mathematical curves into sums of simpler functions, and geometric measure theory.

In fact, in 1971 mathematician Roy Davies was able to prove that the Kakeya surface is always two-dimensional, even if its area vanishes. But in mathematics, people are interested in general results. The experts wanted to solve the problem in n dimensions—does a needle that is rotated along all n spatial directions always cover an n-dimensional volume? This hypothesis is now known as the Kakeya conjecture.

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